On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:28:41 -0800, Larry Jaques wrote:
On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:33:39 -0500, ... Bob Engelhardt ... wrote
RBnDFW wrote:
Steve B wrote:
....
I consider 2 GB a minimum now, Win XP and above.

Thanks for the tip. I had 1/2G, added another 1G ($55, Amazon). My
wife's PC, too. From 256MB (!) to 1G.

She noticed a BIG difference, but I didn't. So I went poking around the
'net & found this free MS utility ("Process Explorer") that monitors
memory usage:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx

To my surprise, I have not seen any memory use above 600MB. I've opened
a number of app's simultaneously, including Adobe Photoshop Elements and
MS Excel, which I had thought were real memory pigs. They added very
little to the usage.

So I'm wondering what uses a lot of memory. Maybe data, like pix &
music. But if MP3 is, say, 2MB/minute, I'd have to have hours of music
IN MEMORY, to get up to a total of 1G. Raw music takes more, but still
... Likewise pix - I'd have to be working on hundreds of them
simultaneously.

Well, then, video. [...]

So, I dunno. Anybody know why a lot of memory might be needed?

Graphics files, animations, movie streaming/cache, database cache, etc.
Browsers now grab 100MB just to start up.

On my linux system with 4GB RAM, I terminate and restart firefox
occasionally, to drop its memory usage back to a reasonable level.
For example, when I restarted firefox a month ago, its resident
memory dropped from over 1GB to under 200MB; on the next restart
(a few minutes ago) it dropped from 726MB resident to 233MB with
40 pages automatically reopened.

--
jiw